The conceit of “readymade” art — to use the term coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1916 — is that it aims to imbue an ordinary item with aesthetic potential, making the smallest amount of alterations necessary. The most famous example of this is, of course, Duchamp’s Fountain, a sculpture of an upside-down porcelain urinal. Readymade art proves Immanuel Kant’s definition of the aesthetic with mathematical efficiency. In “Critique of Judgement,” Kant defines art as that which contains a “purposiveness without a purpose,” meaning merely the form, appearance or feeling of purpose without an actual expressed one. The urinal, right side up, obviously serves the purpose of catching piss. But the urinal upside down? Clearly its design evokes some intention, some purpose, but what that purpose might be is left for you to decide.
In his work “Realty Principle,” current UC Berkeley English doctoral student Eliot D’Silva upsets things a little bit more. Here, readymade is not an object but a practice: the act of staging a house. D’Silva staged an apartment and then choreographed a pretend open house, complete with a pretend realtor handing out pretend business cards. And since the normal purpose of an open house is not here, we are forced to deal with that same open-ended question whose presence is the tell-tale sign of aesthetic experience: What exactly is the meaning behind all of this?
This question greets you upon entering the apartment and follows you after you’ve left. Together, visitors mill around in the living room of the artwork wondering, “Can I sit down on this chair or will one of the organizers politely tell me to stand up?”
Then, a series of robotic clicks emanates loudly from the bathroom. We all cram inside to listen. The familiar, slightly feminine sound of a text-to-speech voice cuts in. It says, sped up, almost stumbling over itself, that it is the mother and it has the password for the blender and the baby.
Following this, a second outburst of clicks is heard from a bedroom, then the kitchen, then the patio. Each room is assigned to a different member of the family and each member lists the objects in the house they own and which they have the passwords for. Most of these items can actually be found in the house and each seems slightly out of place, sometimes wrapped in plastic.
The title of the work puns on Sigmund Freud’s concept of the reality principle, the name Freud gave to the psychic force that delays satisfaction to enable its fulfillment later without violating social norms and laws. The reality principle operates in opposition to the pleasure principle which simply pushes for immediate satisfaction, all the time, regardless of consequence. By aligning “realty” with “reality,” D’Silva suggests a link between the practice of staging a house and the psyche’s norm-enforcing imperative. When a realtor stages a house, they are called upon to actualize norms into space. Every item placed in the kitchen is there because that is what normally belongs in a kitchen. Clients want to feel — or want to feel as if they want to feel — that by buying this house they are accomplishing what our norms instruct us to accomplish: owning a nice home, having two good kids etc.
D’Silva disrupts this carefully staged home with the robotic voices, expressions of the unconscious desires that the real(i)ty principle works to repress. The underbelly of the reality principle’s normative fantasy, we learn, is this greedy, anxious desire for more property. Each family member wants to make clear to the others which items within the house are theirs and theirs alone. The voices’ urgency evokes a mad dash to claim, claim, claim. And it is this propertarianist compulsion which prevents true familial love, making love feel like an automatic task rather than something human.
D’Silva is able to reveal these always present but often hidden lines of desire by taking the practice of house-staging and defamiliarizing it through a removal of its normal purpose. This is art’s simple formula, and D’Silva demonstrates effectively what a genuine and thoughtful employment of it is capable of.
Creating occasions that allow for the defamiliarization of the familiar is what motivated UC Berkeley students Yiming Clara and Hyungtae Kim to create the exhibition series “Speakers Never Learn,” of which “Realty Principle” is the second exhibition. “Realty Principle” can be viewed by appointment until April 26. One more exhibition is planned in the series, for the second week of May, which will feature the work of UC Berkeley rhetoric professor Fumi Okiji.